1491: The truth about the Americas before Columbus

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1491: The truth about the Americas before Columbus

by Benjamin Dangl
ZNet Commentary
July 9, 2006

UpsideDownWorld.Ups

In many high school history classes students are told that before
Columbus arrived the Americas were full of untamed wilderness loosely
populated with savage Indians. Charles Mann's book, 1491: New
Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus proves that the opposite
is true.

He draws from recent archeological and scientific discoveries to
describe booming civilizations which thrived throughout the Americas
centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Like Howard Zinn's A
People's History of the United States this book made me want to call
up my old history teachers and tell them they were very wrong. In
fact, Mann's self-described thesis is to show that indigenous
societies before the arrival of Columbus deserve more than a few
misleading pages in a textbook.

Mann was able to hold my attention not just with the details of
complex indigenous societies, but also with controversies, adventures
and divisions among the scientists and archeologists which have
contributed to what we know of pre-Columbian history. Not only is he
able to make squabbles between European archeologists interesting,
but he's able to smoothly describe scientific data and Mayan politics
in the same breath.

The book is brimming with shocking information like the fact that the
city of Tiwanaku, in what is now Bolivia, had 115,000 people living
in it in 1000 A.D., a population that Paris would not reach for five
centuries. Among other surprises we learn that Pocahontas means
"little hellion" and there are less people living in the Amazon now
than there were in 1491. Mann points out that the British and French,
not the indigenous people, were the savages. The Europeans arriving
in North America smelled horrible; some of them had never taken a
bath their whole lives. On the other hand, the indigenous people were
generally very clean, strong and well nourished.

The first section of the book deals largely with new revelations
about the sicknesses such as small pox and Hepatitis A which ravaged
the native populations of the Americas shortly after the arrival of
the Europeans. The death toll is as surprising as the size of the
populations before Columbus. When Columbus landed, there were an
estimated 25 million people living in Mexico. At the time, there were
only 10 million people in Spain and Portugal. Central Mexico was more
densely populated than China or India when Columbus arrived. An
estimated 90-112 million lived in the Americas, which was a larger
population than that of Europe. Mann also pointed out that the Incas
ruled the biggest empire on earth ever. In their prime, the kingdom's
span equaled the distance between St. Petersburg and Cairo.

The bloodshed unleashed by the Europeans had a lot do with killing
off of these populations. Yet sickness played perhaps an even larger
role. Smallpox hit the Andes before Spain's Pizarro did, killing off
most people and plunging the area into civil war. The sickness is
thought to have arrived to the region from the Caribbean. Hepatitis A
killed off an estimated 90% of the population in coastal New England
in 3 years. Within first years of European contact, 95% of native
populations died. These numbers seem hard to believe, but Mann's
exhausting research draws from decades of investigations from dozens
of scientists and archeologists.

While reading this book, I realized how inaccurate it is to describe
the Americas as the "New World." Nothing could be further from the
truth. The Americas were inhabited by people 20-30,0000 years ago.
Europe, on the other hand, was occupied by humans more recently,
18,000 years ago at the most.

This book proves that the wilderness in the Americas before the
Europeans arrived was far from wild and untouched by humans. Mann
argues that pre-Columbus wilderness was totally affected and shaped
by the native people that lived there. For example, the Mayans
destroyed their own environment; they cut down too many trees and
exhausted the soil. As their population expanded the environment and
agriculture could no longer sustain them. This greatly contributed to
their collapse.

Other indigenous groups altered their ecosystems to facilitate their
survival. Societies in the Amazon regularly burned down vast expanses
of the forest; the charred soil was good for agriculture and the fire
flushed out animals for food. The plains the US are believed to be a
result of similar forest-burning techniques. Indigenous hunters
before Columbus sought out pregnant animals to lower the population;
indigenous people competed with animals for food, berries and nuts.
Indigenous societies also built vast canals, cities, irrigation
systems, large agricultural fields, entirely changing the wilderness
for human use.

When the first European explorers passed over the Mississippi they
saw millions of bison and other animals. This was not because
indigenous people didn't hunt them. In fact, these animal populations
were large because their predators, the indigenous people, had been
killed off by European sicknesses. Similarly, the death from these
sicknesses allowed ecosystems to thrive without the impact of humans
until the European colonies expanded. What Europeans actually saw
when they fully explored and settled in "wilder" regions was the
death of the landscape shaped by indigenous cultures.

Though I was in awe of such revelations and the vast research Mann
put into the book, I couldn't help but wonder about his sources. I
know that most indigenous societies did not have any extensive
written history, and so much of what is known about their day to day
life, culture, wars and religion is guesswork. Mann's book is based
primarily on research, analysis and theories from Europeans and North
Americans. Perhaps this reflects the academic, scientific and
archeological world more than it does Mann's approach. However, I
wanted to hear more from contemporary Mayan, Mapuche, Incan and
Aymara people about their own versions of this history, people who
still practice these ancient politics, customs and religions. Stories
and histories exist among descendent of these civilizations, but Mann
doesn't draw from them enough.

My wariness of his choice of sources increased when he described
visiting ruins in Peru and commented on a "curious sight":

".[S]kulls from the cemetery, gathered into several small piles.
Around them were beer cans, cigarette butts, patent-medicine bottles,
half-burned photographs and candles shaped like naked women. These
last had voodoo pins stuck in their heads and vaginas. Local people
came to these places at night and either dug for treasure or
practiced witchcraft, Haas [Mann's archeologist friend] said. In the
harsh afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad."

This sounds similar to the kind of disdain the Spanish looked upon
indigenous religions when they first arrived. How does Mann know that
this "witchcraft" isn't a modern day version of what the Incas
practiced? Instead of ancient broken pottery and gold jewelry, he
found beer bottles and photographs. Why does he immediately dismiss
this as "tacky and sad"? Could this "witchcraft" serve as a gateway
to understanding ancient Andean religions? Elsewhere in the book he
criticizes locals who rob from the ruins to sell gold and artifacts
to feed their families. I'd say that gold is put to better use
feeding a family than sitting in a museum. Observations such as these
from Mann made me think even more about the millions of indigenous
voices left out of this book about indigenous societies.

None the less, it deserves to be required reading in high schools
along with the many other books which have taken on the "official"
histories of the hemisphere.

[Charles Mann's book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus is available on Amazon.com. Benjamin Dangl is the editor of
UpsideDownWorld.UpsideDownWorld.<WBR>org, a website uncovering acti
Latin America. He is the author of "The Price of Fire: Resource Wars
and Social Movements in Bolivia" forthcoming in March, 2007 from AK
Press. He recently won a Project Censored Award for his coverage of
US military operations in Paraguay.]

--
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is exercised under cover
of law, and with the colors of justice..."
- U.S. v Jannotti, 673 F.2d 578, 614 (3d Cir. 1982)